Doug Fine: Author, Journalist, Adventurer, Goat-Herder

 

As the greening world stretches skyward in rain salutation with the start of this year’s blessedly on-time monsoon season here in the desert, today’s carbon-neutral Dispatch (except for the postscripts) is also an essay that was just published in Plenty Magazine. It represents a triumph! The successful resolution of one of great missions and loose ends in Farewell, My Subaru. Here goes:

Growing up in the Ice Cream Truck era, I didn’t associate the frozen delicacy with patience. In fact, to my truck-chasing child mind, ice cream meant instant gratification, provided I had a buck in my sock. But making homemade ice cream fit for an Organic Cowboy’s strict low-carbon (if not low-carb) diet requires what even the patient would call patience. In my case, several years’ worth.

First I peeled back two entire calendars, waiting for Natalie, the tiny goat kid I got off Craigslist, to produce milk.

 

That actually was the bearable part of the wait, because Natalie, her sister Melissa, and now Natalie’s daughter Nico (all named after singers I like but think sound a little goat-like, in Natalie Merchant, Melissa Etheridge and the Velvet Underground’s Nico) have been such a pleasurable addition to the family. Or addition to the kitchen, as in last week, when Natalie crept in through the dog door and made herself at home with some lettuce I had left within reach on the counter.

But when it comes to my long (actually 38-year) wait for homemade ice cream, I think without question the hardest trial for my evolving patience muscle were those last four hours, dealing with the ice cram maker a friend had loaned me. Like the Griswalds on their never-ending trip to Wallyworld in the first Vacation movie, there seemed always one more step before I reached my decadent destination. I needed, for example, to chill the inner chamber of the ice cream maker (the freezer can) for several hours (that felt like eons) to prevent plutonium ice cream rocks. This I learned to my dread when I Googled “best organic goat ice cream recipes.” The warning was clear: uncooled ice cream machinery results in petrified ice cream.

The delay at this point was beginning to hurt innocent civilians. I had to send my hiking friend KB home, for example, when it turned out my promise of post-hike strawberry ice cream was an embarrassing false alarm. I wanted not to believe the Sisyphean necessities in such a simple thing as freezing sweetened cream (age the goat milk, for crying out loud? Scald the sweetened mixture?), But the multitudinous virtual recipes I cross-referenced did corroborate one another.

As it does with any tragic circumstance, acceptance slowly set in, because the integrity (read: taste) of the inaugural batch of Funky Butte Ranch zero carbon-mile homemade Natalie goat ice cream was not something I was willing to trifle with. And here’s why: ice cream, as a gourmet treat, is a hugely important symbol for me, the explicit reason I became an organic goat herder (to the detriment of nearly any other activity in my life). In Farewell, My Subaru, I made this point repeatedly—that to live sustainably, one needn’t eat only dirt outside one’s remote cabin. All one had to be was creative to be a functioning green citizen, no matter what one’s dietary addictions (and ice cream is a food group for me). And to prove it, I wrote, I’d shift my ice cream base of operations from the Ben and Jerry’s factory 2,400 miles away to right here on the Ranch. OK, the vanilla came from just south of my New Mexico home in Old Mexico, and maybe I’ll use local honey to sweeten the mixture in future, but in my defense, even the eggs in the custard-style ice cream recipe I used were from my Funky Butte Ranch chickens, laid that morning. That first batch was about as low in carbon miles as ice cream can get. Even the freezer that made the ice is solar-powered.

 

The verdict, according to the taste buds that had eaten an average of 1.6 bowls of ice cream per day, every day of my life? A bit watery in the middle, and I had some last-minute technical difficulties due to my inexperience with the ice cream maker combined with my lack of advanced degrees in molecular chemistry (necessary to balance the ice/rock salt ratio) and electrical engineering (the plug had a short).

But the taste? Not just because the milk came from Natalie, who I’ve raised since before she was weaned. Not just because I am a sugar addict. And, truly, not just because my favorite dessert is finally and forevermore guilt free (except for calories): this week’s strawberry ice cream was best tasting bowl bar none I’ve ever had. Including Ben sand Jerry’s Half Baked and Breyers Chocolate. I ate the first two bowls in bed in my favorite dish with the monkeys on it, and, to fully disclose, spilled a lot of it in bed, too, resulting in ant nightmares all night.

Nothing could ruin this genuine triumph, though, this life milestone for me. A lot of time, love and work went into that first bite of Funky Butte Ranch Organic Strawberry Ice Cream – my wrists already are muscular to the point that they would raise the suspicion of Olympic doping testers, this from daily Natalie milking. But you know what? Almost no carbon miles went into it. And by next year hopefully the Ranch peach trees will have matured enough to provide the fruit part of the Recipe. Never have I meant it more literally when I exclaim, “Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet.”

 

P.S. There’s a mathematical mechanics to the order of doing things with goats — first you extract the nanny-to-be-milked from the corral (or wherever she’s foraging that day), Then you distract the other goats with some hay, then you load the nanny in the milker (a medieval looking device, but she enters willingly), then bribe her to relax with grain and verbal sweet talk while you apply some coconut oil (more natural than bag balm) to your fingers to begin the mutual milking workout. But the real secret of goat milking, I’ve found, is for both human and non-human to let their mind wander, to forget they’re doing a weird inter-species lactating thing, and enjoy the softer late afternoon apricot shade on the shale of the nearby cliffs. This also allows me to forget the pain in the developing muscles of my milking hands, while affording a fine view of the great horned owl nest seated in a guano-stained crevice in the Ranch’s namesake Funky Butte.

 

Usually after a few minutes of owl-watching (there are two chicks this year), my mind gives way to almost hysterical appreciation. Common (but always intense) thoughts include, “This whole two year project actually worked? My goats survived? Natalie was bred and had babies? I milk her, and I drink that incomparably delicious, creamy, local milk (nearly a half gallon per day now) and make yogurt, hot chocolate and ice cream?

This kid raised on Dominoes Pizza and Gilligan’s Island still, a couple of months in, has trouble grasping that he really gets a lot of his homestead’s protein from that one-time tiny snot ball, nub-horned Pan Natalie. What a miracle! When I read about ancient herding cultures, it always seemed so natural. You carry a hooked walking stick and watch sheep. I never realized how much time, how much love, goes into it. But I guess that’s true of any worthwhile endeavor that doesn’t get delivered in thirty minutes or less.

And let me not artificially focus only on the positive. As I’ve made the clear theme of plenty of Dispatches herein, goats are the world’s most maddeningly mischievous species. It’s what makes them such great survivors. And at this point, knowing most of their predilections (if not half their bag of tricks), they only outsmart me with expensive consequences about once per week. For example, I was sitting in lotus in the dirt of the goat corral yesterday morning, meditating, breathing, concentrating on things like chakras and posture, and thinking, “Thank God my life these days provides the opportunity to just sit, breathe, open my mind and…discipline goats?” Melissa, I noticed, had just figured out the corral gate latch. (This is a mind, evolutionarily-speaking, supposedly 30 million years more primitive than the chimpanzee.) I watched her do it three times as each time she interrupted my sit. Mischievousness during meditation, as far as I’m concerned, is like attacking on Yom Kippur. I now have to carabiner my goats in to their home. As is now routine, I tromped up to the ranch house, not as centered and One With the Cosmos as I had hoped following my wrestling match with the goats to get them back inside the corral, and told my sweetheart, “I was outsmarted by our goats again.”

She said, as she always does, “It’s not that hard to do.”

But then later that day I noticed that a simple mug of Natalie’s milk totally satisfied me as a mid-afternoon post-tomato-weeding snack. On balance, I wouldn’t change a thing. Other than I’d like to be done writing just now, and eating strawberry ice cream. So be it. You’ve got to live your dreams, if you want happiness in this life. This I believe.

 

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